In a general process of butchering a poultry carcass such as a chicken, into a meat portion and a bone portion, butchering, deboning, and removal of guts and the like (evisceration) are performed after feather removal and blood draining. Human labor cannot efficiently perform the butchering/deboning processing for poultry carcasses, and thus has been taken over by automated processes. For many years, the present applicants have been engaged in development of automatic deboning technique for a poultry carcass.
The automatic deboning processing is executed for an upper body of a poultry carcass which is eviscerated and which has the leg portions and breast meat removed. Here, the poultry carcass is fixed on a conical fixing jig known as a “cone” to be in an appropriate posture during the entire deboning processing. In the processing, the poultry carcasses in this state is subjected to the deboning processing executed by a plurality of processing units.
In an automatic deboning device disclosed in Patent Document 1, a plurality of the cones stand at an equal interval on an outer edge portion of a rotatable disk, and a plurality of processing units are arranged in the periphery of the disk. The deboning processing is executed with the disk, on which the upper body of the poultry carcass is placed and fixed, rotating so that the upper body of the poultry carcasses sequentially moves to the processing units.